Let us
suppose that we discover, say in a mountain hollow in western
Virginia, a group of humans bereft not just of speech but of
language. They are of European stock, the descendants of a group
of workers and their wives isolated in the hollow when a lumbering
and railroad-building scheme collapsed in the 1840s. A century and
a half of inbreeding in this small group (originally about 100,
now 162) has had some striking effects in uniformity of
appearance, unusual frequencies of some physical abnormalities,
and so on.

But by far
the most striking thing about the Wahokies (as they are called,
from a mountain overlooking their small valley) is that they are
wholly devoid of any language. They speak no language, read no
language (even though they have preserved some newspapers and a
Bible that belonged to their ancestors) and sing no songs. Wahokie
toddlers do not babble, and preliminary results indicate that
Wahokie children raised in ordinary families show little interest
in language and make very little progress in learning to
understand or to speak a language. (The oldest such Wahokie child
is now six, and is far behind a normal three-year-old.) Some very
limited success in teaching a few words to a few Wahokies has been
attained at great expenditure of time and effort.

As far as can
be determined the Wahokies have no abnormalities of the speech
organs. Their vision and hearing are, on average, better than that
of a normal population. For some reason, doubtless buried in brain
chemistry or hardware, they just can't, or don't care to, master
anything like a fully fledged human language. The cause is almost
certainly genetic (no plausible environmental factors have been
found) but it has not yet been identified. Comparative DNA
research continues. No offspring of Wahokie/normal couplings are
known to exist. In fact no such couplings have been acknowledged,
though several have been rumoured.

Although the
Wahokies are unquestionably human, their lack of language makes
them quite unlike any other group of humans heretofore
encountered. Without language they are effectively without
culture. Anthropologists refuse to call them a 'tribe'. They are
perhaps a band. They have no religion, and since they have no way
of reckoning descent and relation, no incest taboos. Mothers and
children seem to recognise a special relation, as do siblings, but
that's about it. They are divided into about ten to twenty groups
that merge, divide and exchange members. Most groups are
controlled by a single dominant male.

The discovery
of the Wahokies has created a number of most perplexing legal,
administrative and moral problems. Are the Wahokies citizens? Do
they own 'their' land? Are they subject to the criminal law? The
state Attorney-General has ruled that they are citizens, and that
any who wish to register to vote, and can show that they are at
least eighteen years of age, must be allowed to do so. However, no
Wahokie has shown any interest in voting, and no one has found a
way of explaining government and representation to any of them.

The
citizenship question is not a pressing one, but serious conflicts
have arisen about the Wahokie children. A number of the youngest
have been removed from their groups by county social workers and
placed in foster homes (it is these cases that provide the best
evidence about language acquisition, or rather its absence).
Sporadic attempts were made, for a few months, to enforce the laws
mandating compulsory school attendance. This was abandoned once it
was realised that the school system was wholly unprepared to deal
with the children.

A number of
normal humans formed Friends of the Wahokies and this group has
been successful in obtaining court injunctions prohibiting any
encroachment on the lands the Wahokies have been occupying,
forbidding any further removal of Wahokie children and suspending
the enforcement of some parts of the criminal law (in particular
those laws proscribing incest and setting the age of sexual
consent).

The Friends
of the Wahokies and other benevolently inclined normal humans
often disagree about the best course of action. Some argue that we
should let the Wahokies be Wahokies and prevent outside
interference. But most of these support the programmes of
immunisation and emergency medical care now being provided to the
Wahokies. Others argue that the only way to prevent this
catastrophic impairment from continuing is to prevent the Wahokies
from reproducing. Perhaps contraceptive injections or implants
could be given in the course of other medical treatment. The Roman
Catholic bishop within whose diocese the Wahokies live is of
course strongly opposed to this.

In opposition
to the Friends of the Wahokies, the Attorney-General, and the
bishop, who agree that the Wahokies' interests, whatever they are,
must be protected, stands the coalition headed by Jim's River
Laboratories. The coalition argues that it should be allowed to
capture the Wahokies either by removing them or by enclosing their
hollows, and to utilise them for research and testing.

The argument
is straightforward. The Wahokies are humans, that is, they are
members of the species Homo sapiens, but they are not
persons since they are devoid of language and thus of reflective
self-consciousness. They do not have the concept of a right and
thus cannot have rights. Of course they are sentient, intelligent
and self-conscious in a nonreflective way, but so are monkeys and
rats. We do not hesitate to experiment on rats in search of
benefits for human persons. Nor should we hesitate to experiment
on human nonpersons for the benefit of human persons. Since the
Wahokies are in fact members of the same biological species they
are much more valuable for research and toxico-logical testing
than rats, or rhesus monkeys, or even chimpanzees. We must not let
uninformed sentiment hold back the search for truth and safety.

Are the
Wahokies Persons?

If we assume
a sharp division between persons and nonpersons, and also
understand 'person' in a very strong sense, then probably the
Wahokies are not persons. If to be a person one must be capable of
formulating a life plan, of entering into fairly abstract
contractual relations with others, and of having second-order
preferences about one's preferences, then the Wahokies are not
persons. And if the moral universe is divided exclusively into the
all-important group of persons and the unimportant group of
everything else, it follows that the Wahokies' interests are
vastly less significant than ours.

But the
universe, physical and moral, is not like that. The interests of
persons matter and beer cans have no interests. But there are many
other sorts of things that matter. Some of these things, works of
art, for example, may have no interests of their own and yet
matter morally because persons take interests in them. More
important in the present connection are the many entities that
have interests of their own even though they fall short of full
personhood.

A shrimp or a
worm has, it appears, rather few interests, perhaps only that
minimal interest in avoiding pain and seeking pleasure shared by
all sentient beings. A chicken's interests are more extensive, a
dog's or a cat's still more. Intelligent social beings such as
wolves, monkeys and porpoises have very extensive physical,
behavioural, social and (yes) intellectual interests.

The Wahokies
are very intelligent, inquisitive, highly social, and sensitive
beings. Let it be agreed that, due to their impairment, they fail
to attain full personhood. It certainly does not follow that they
are on an equal moral footing with beer cans. They are entitled to
very substantial moral standing in their own right. They are, in
fact, at least quasipersons.

Persons
and Quasipersons

'Quasiperson'
is a neologism, of course, but it refers to a sort of moral and
legal status that our conceptual system has recognised, in various
ways, for millennia. Some classes of human beings have been
accorded a standing different from, and generally lower than, that
of fully fledged persons, but higher than that of any other
animals or any inanimate objects.

Slaves were
generally considered quasipersons. To the extent that a society is
sexist (at least in the modes with which we are familiar) women
are treated as quasipersons. Infants and small children are
quasipersons everywhere, as, generally, are the severely mentally
impaired of any age. A quasiperson lacks the full range of rights
accorded to a person, but enjoys at least most of the protections
of personhood. Sometimes quasipersonhood may carry special
protections not accorded full persons. Consider child labour laws,
or the exclusion, under American law, of women from combat. Such
protections are typically, as in these two examples,
paternalistic.

In an
advanced sexist, racist, society such as the Athens of 400 BC or
the Virginia of 1840 with which the Wahokies' ancestors lost
touch, the layers of status may be numerous. Virginia's laws then
distinguished clearly and variously between adult white males (the
only fully fledged citizens, i.e. legal persons), adult white
females, white children, free blacks, slaves and the mentally
impaired.

Multiplicity
of status is not a thing of the past. Women are still subject to
restrictions, some legal and many social, that do not apply to
men, even in the most egalitarian modern societies.

The
quasipersonal status of the young and the impaired is even
clearer. The very young, and those declared incompetent, are
restricted and protected in a variety of ways. In general the
(normal) young pass through a range of stages on the way to full
personhood, some of them clearly defined by legal requirements for
driving, voting, drinking, compulsory school attendance, and so
on, others much more vaguely determined by custom and parental
judgement.

The Wahokies
are in some ways like children, in some ways like the broadly
mentally impaired, in some ways like neither. Their interests,
their desires and their capabilities should determine their
status. Since they are incapable of understanding such notions as
contract or representation it is justifiable to deny them
contractual and political rights and to assign guardians to
supervise their interests in such arenas. Since, on the other
hand, they are quite capable of making plans, appreciating cause
and effect, and expressing their preferences and aversions, their
liberties should generally be restricted as little as possible.
The details of their status, including the difficulties of
balancing the conflicting interests of individual Wahokies, will
have to be worked out politically.

But surely
Jim's River Laboratories' argument will have not the slightest
weight. The Wahokies are obviously sensitive, intelligent and
self-conscious. Their lack of language and all that follows
therefrom does not justify experimenting on them without their
consent any more than it would justify such experiments on normal
children of eighteen months.

Wahokies
and Other Great Apes

The point of
this thought experiment (or fairy-tale, if you wish) is, of
course, not the moral status of Wahokies, for there are none. The
point is the status of chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans.
Chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans are similar in all morally
relevant characteristics to the imaginary Wahokies. So, since the
Wahokies are entitled to a protected quasipersonal status, these
other great apes are entitled to such status as well.

One way to
resist this conclusion is to reject the analogy between nonhuman
great apes and Wahokies as defective in some crucial way. Are
chimpanzees, say, unlike the Wahokies in a morally important
respect?

It might be
said that the Wahokies are our kin, genetically related to us, and
chimpanzees are not. As it stands this is just not so. The
Wahokies are more closely related to us than are the chimpanzees,
but both are our relatives. Or rather, the Wahokies are more
closely related to some of us. I am an American of European
ancestry for at least ten generations, and probably more. The
Wahokies are more closely related to me than to a Japanese woman
with ten or twenty generations of Japanese ancestors.

But unless we
are racists of the crudest sort all this is just irrelevant. That
some American stranger is much more closely my kin than the
Japanese woman just mentioned has not the slightest bearing on his
or her moral standing. Both are entitled to my respect in their
own right. Once we have escaped a narrow tribal morality we
understand that moral status is determined by a being's
characteristics, not its pedigree. This is as true of chimpanzees,
gorillas, orang-utans and Wahokies as of normal humans.

I take it for
granted that all humans have a common set of ancestors. But
suppose that this were not so, that we originated from multiple
parallel evolutionary paths, miraculously interfertile, or that
one strand of humanity evolved and the rest were created by aliens
to match. These suppositions are bizarre and wildly implausible,
but, if true, would in no way impugn the moral status of any
human. The question is not how we got here, but what we are like.

If, then, the
Wahokie/great ape analogy is to be overthrown it must be on the
grounds of some substantial difference. Wahokies look like us
(some of us) and chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans don't
(much), but it is hard to see how anyone could, with a straight
face, base an argument on that. Much more plausible would be a
claim that the mental life of Wahokies is of a much higher and
more complex sort than that of chimpanzees, gorillas or
orang-utans. Could such a claim be made out?

We cannot, of
course, give comparative intelligence tests to Wahokies and
chimpanzees for the simple reason that there are no Wahokies. Some
might claim it to be intuitively obvious that there is much more
to the intellectual difference between 'mere apes' and normal
humans than the absence or presence of language. I do not find
that obvious at all, and I suspect that anyone who does is
underestimating the minds of chimpanzees, gorillas and
orang-utans, the importance of language, or both.

There are no
knockdown arguments here, only more or less well-informed
predictions of what time will tell as we learn more and more about
ourselves, the other great apes, and the minds and brains of all
of us. No matter how much evidence accumulates, no matter how
deeply a high regard for chimpanzee, gorilla and orang-utan
intelligence becomes entrenched in successful science, it will be
possible for speciesists to insist on an enormous gap between ape
and human. It is still possible to insist on a flat earth, or on
special creation of each species. In a couple of decades all these
claims will be on the same footing.

[It would be
possible for someone to accept the claim that the Wahokies are the
moral peers of chimpanzees without renouncing the exploitation of
chimpanzees in research, entertainment and so on. One need only
accept the Jim's River Laboratories' argument sketched out above.
The general form of my argument in this chapter is reductio ad
absurdum. If one does not find the suggested exploitation of
language-less humans morally 'absurd' (i.e. outrageously
repellent) one will not be moved by this argument.]

What sorts of
quasipersons are chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans? That is,
what should their legal and moral status be? Clearly they should
be protected from assault and exploitation. Killing a chimpanzee,
gorilla or orang-utan should be counted as homicide just as and
when killing a human is so counted. Gorillas, chimpanzees and
orangutans should be protected from harassment, physical abuse and
deprivation of livelihood. They should not be experimented upon
without their consent. They should not be confined or restricted
except when necessary to prevent injury to themselves or others.

In practice,
the best thing we can do for these apes is to leave them alone,
setting aside preserves for them with strict controls on human
entrance. Non-disruptive research, some degree of medical care,
perhaps emergency feeding — these activities might be appropriate.
The Wahokies of the story are defective humans, and it may be
permissible to limit their reproduction. But chimpanzees, gorillas
and orang-utans are not defective humans, they are normal
chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. We should wish them well,
protect them from ourselves, and let them be.